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It’s hard to underestimate the importance of confidence. Confidence in yourself is needed if you want to reach your goals and live up to your potential. Without it, you might not go after all the things you want out of life. With enough self-confidence, you could begin that dream project. You could let go of all your fears and start living life on your terms. No fear or doubt could hold you back.

But self-confidence doesn’t come easy. It’s built over a lifetime of experiences and risk-taking opportunities. Yet there are many things people do that undermine and hurt their confidence before they’ve even had a chance to build it up. Tiny little mistakes can cause big problems unless corrected.

Any of these eight mistakes could be killing your confidence.

Assuming you should feel as confident inside as others are outside

Everyone’s point of view takes place from the inside-out. That is, we see everything from our own thoughts, feelings and fears. On the other hand, we can only see others from the outside-in. We can only see their actions and outward appearance, but not their inner thoughts and fears.

So when we compare ourselves to other people, we have mismatched viewpoints. Others may seem so self-confident that we think they have no doubts or fears. That can make us feel bad about our own confidence and any doubt can be seen as a sign of weakness.

However, if we actually were able to look inside other people, you’d notice that more people have doubts and fears than we realize. It’s just that we can’t dig into their minds to see it.

Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.

Forgetting to watch your body language

Little shifts in body language can affect your self-esteem and level of confidence.

Are you slouching? Are you in a closed posture and hanging your head low? If you’re doing these things, you’ll feel extremely unconfident.

Your thoughts will change as a result. If you act confident, your mind will believe it.

Worrying about the things you can’t control

What if the weather turns bad and I arrive late? What if I get sick?

It’s easy to get sucked into the land of “what if’s”. In this place, you worry about all those things you don’t have control over.

If you want to build confidence, you have to let go of those things you can’t control.

Worrying about these things makes you feel helpless. Instead of actively controlling the events going on around you, you’re passive. Things happen to you instead. That’s not the sign of someone with confidence. Should you add to focus your energy on what you can control?

Negative self-talk

Watch your inner dialogue. What kind of thoughts do you have about yourself?

If you say a lot of mean things to yourself or come down hard on your mistakes, you’re only doing yourself a disservice.

You may think that being hard on yourself will push you to do better next time, but it could also be cutting your self-confidence down. Yeah, you might motivate yourself to do that thing, but it will hurt you later when you try to do something else.

If you make a mistake or don’t live up to expectations, learn from it. Shake it off and move on. Lingering on it with negative thoughts will not do you any good.

Trying to fix it in your mind instead of the real world

So negative thinking can bring you down, but does positive thinking bring you up? Yes, but only to a certain point. You can’t build confidence completely in your mind. You can think positively and build inner confidence as much as you want, but eventually you have to bring it out into the real world.

The surest way to build confidence is to get real-word experience. Go out and do what you want to do. Learn from mistakes and keep building yourself up.

That’s how confidence is best built and maintained.

Overestimating your abilities

It’s good to be confident in yourself, but bad to be over-confident.

Over-estimating your skills will hurt you even more once you face reality. If you’ve built yourself up, you’ll have to deal with the fall. That can be devastating.

You definitely want to push yourself, but be realistic about your skills. Don’t let a fantasy mindset crash against the wall of reality.

Never taking accountability

Self-confidence is about belief. You have to believe in what you’re doing and that your actions are exactly what you want to be doing.

That means taking accountability for those actions. If they don’t turn out exactly the way you want, you have to accept that and take responsibility. Own up to your actions. Be accountable for them.

If you honestly made the best decision with the information you had, you have nothing to be afraid of. If you didn’t, it may be time to re-examine your decision-making.

In either case, own your decisions. Only those without confidence to back up their choices would back away from them after the fact.

Letting fear run your actions

It’s all right to be afraid – it’s part of being human. In fact, I’d say that fear is a sign that you’re heading in the right direction – it means you’re pushing yourself past your comfort zone. But sometimes fear takes over. It leads to procrastination. We start avoiding things and push them off over and over again.

Volleyball was invented as a safe recreational sport for adults and now has blossomed into the world’s fifth most popular sport with over 1 billion players.

What are some of the other unique attributes of the sport? You might be surprised to know that:

Volleyball was invented in 1895 in Massachusetts by William G. Morgan.

Volleyball was initially named “mintonette” but was changed to volleyball when Morgan heard an observer of the game point out that the players were “volleying” the ball back and forth to each other over the net.

In 1916, the skills of set and spike were originated during a match in the Philippines.

The Volleyball Hall of Fame founded in 1971 and is located in Holyoke MA. It has over 100 honorees including players, coaches, officials, and contributors.

Volleyball originally was an indoor only game, beach volleyball stems back to the 1920’s in California.

The first two-man beach game was played in 1930.

In 1900 the first specially designed ball for the sport was created.

Having over a hundred years of history, on July 7th, 1896 the first official volleyball game was played at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

Although in 1924 volleyball was demonstrated as an unofficial event during the Olympics that year in Paris, men’s and women’s volleyball wasn’t introduced as an official sport at the Olympic Games until 1964 in Tokyo, Japan.

In 1947 the Federation International De Volleyball (FIVB) came into existence, and volleyball became an official game.

The first men’s World Championships were held in 1949; in 1952 the first Championship was held for women.

During the summer of 1976, at Will Rogers State Beach, the first professional beach volleyball tournament took place. It was called the “Olympia World Championship of Beach Volleyball”.

Beach volleyball became an Olympic sport in 1996 for both men and women.

Volleyball is a great workout, as most volleyball players jump about 300 times a match!

The only Olympic sport that has a rule prohibiting the players from wearing too much is beach volleyball.

75 hours and 30 minutes is the time for the longest volleyball game ever recorded; the game took place in Kingston, North Carolina. That’s quite the workout!

The first volleyballs were the bladders of basketballs until Spalding Company invented a separate volleyball in 1898.​

During a match, players are known to vertically leap over 300 times.

The fastest serve was clocked at 132 kilometers an hour – 81.84 miles an hour.

American Karch Kiraly is the only person to win a Golden Medals Indoors (1984 & 1988) and as a Sand Player (1992).

Only the Cuba Women have won three consecutive indoors Gold Medals (1992, 1996, 2000).

On the sand, only Kerri Walsh-Jennings and Misty May-Treanor have won three consecutive Gold Medals as teammates. (2004, 2008. 2012).

In 1999,Rally Scoring became the method of tracking a score as opposed to the original format of only the serving team could score.